Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker (part one)

(note - this is what you sound like once you've let JG Ballard into your head)


This unassuming house-like building located rather incongruously in the middle of a wood is the entrance to Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker near Brentwood, Essex.


Presumably it was made to look like a house to deter people looking for shelter - although I find its failure in this respect just the first of many fascinations about this place.  It looks municipal somehow.  It represents the banal officiousness of death.


I visited the bunker a few years ago - twice in the same week because I was so spellbound.  It really is an almost mythical place - somehow magical and dark and appalling and wonderful.


Like a lot of children in the 80s I was terrified of nuclear war above all things when I was growing up.  Over the years this fear has mutated into a perverse fascination - almost an intense, trembly love of anything even related to nuclear destruction.  I am slightly horrified by this tendency within myself and yet I embrace it because we are all alchemists of fear - we all turn it into gold within ourselves.  


I suppose we enjoy the pumping of adrenalin and the endorphine rush - pretty much absent in a largely safe world.  And also there IS something beautiful about the majestic destruction wrought by a nuclear bomb - the graceful hand sweeping across the surface of the Earth and ripping everything away, leaving nothing but clean, cauterised rubble.


I also grimly enjoy the campaigns, the public information, the 'Protect and Survive' leaflets and films.  I don't know what it is - maybe it's just everything about it scares me rigid and that fear is one of the most exciting things I know.  It's somewhere I go in myself to feel truly alive.  Just sometimes.


So, with that background you will probably see why I was so intoxicated by Kelvedon Hatch - a rare example of a nuclear bunker which is open to the public.


When I say the word 'bunker' it probably sounds like rather a small affair - oh no.  The 'bunker' is huge - I suppose it's like the office of a government department transplanted underground.  Upon entering you find no one there to take your entrance fee, which you are probably holding in your sweaty little hand.  In fact you just pick up an audio guide handset and make your way down some steps.  It's disconcerting from the very start.


You walk down a very long tunnel.  This would protect the people inside from the blast, as well as being easy to defend - a chilling fact which can't help occurring to you as you walk down it.  On the wall is an illustration of how the bunker would act as a Faraday cage and protect the inhabitants from the electro magnetic pulse caused by cloudburst nuclear weapons.  On the other side are temporary bunk beds.  The whole place smells like taupe musty office folders.


At the end of the tunnel is a radio communication room, filled with pleasingly chunky analogue equipment.  Then you walk through the enormous blast doors into the bunker proper...